Interviewing the owners of the place that started the modern day LGBTQ+ movement was beyond exciting, and what I learned about them has impressed me. It also comes to you a little differently than usual. A recording issue means I can't bring you the audio of what was intended to be a Still Here conversation with Stacy Lentz and Kurt Kelly, co-owners of the Stonewall Inn, so instead you're getting the long version, in full, in (digital) print.
If you know your queer history, you know what the Stonewall Inn means. It's the bar where the 1969 uprising began, the birthplace of the modern LGBTQ+ rights movement. I told Stacy and Kurt that the moment I first walked through its doors, back in 2019, is one I'll never forget. What I didn't fully appreciate until this conversation is quite how close the world came to losing it altogether, and how much unglamorous work it has taken to keep it not just standing, but relevant.
Two very different roads to the same door
Stacy grew up in a farming community in Kansas so small that, as she put it, its population of around 100 probably included the dogs, sheep and cows. She was one of sixteen kids in her graduating class, raised in the 70s and 80s with no LGBTQ+ representation on television and certainly none in her conservative, Christian small town. After Kansas State, she graduated in 1992 and moved to Washington DC, where she knocked on doors for the Clinton-Gore campaign, her first taste of both activism and fundraising. In 1994 she moved to New York and fell in love with the West Village, where she frequented a piano bar called the Duplex while running large executive search firms, two of which she took onto the Inc. 5000 list. It was at the Duplex, taking her staff for happy hours, that she met Kurt.
Kurt's story starts an hour and a half away in a small Pennsylvania farming town. Born in the late 60s, he came to New York in the late 80s to study acting, and when that didn't pay the bills he started working at the Duplex, singing and doing comedy on the piano bar's mic. It was through a beer rep at the Duplex that he and his bosses, Bill Morgan and Tony DiCicco, first heard the Stonewall Inn was going under.
The bar that almost became a Starbucks
Kurt and his partners went to the management company as soon as they heard the rumour, in April. They were told, in his words, "we never heard of anything like that." Then in July, the call came: Stonewall really was going under. Kurt asked Stacy if she wanted to be an investor. She said yes, and within ten years the partners recognised her value enough to make her a part owner.
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